Preface This book is a work of both extensive research and the imagination. It is at once a distillation and an elaboration of the facts.
I began with the names. At that time, it was only two months since the tragedy and the lists of victims were incomplete and incorrect. I worked solely from the Internet, using the lists posted by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN. All the lists were different. All the lists changed every day: names added, names deleted, spellings changed and then changed back again. Nobody knew yet how many people had died.
For four months I worked only on the names.
Listing the names of the dead on memorials to tragedies involving large-scale loss has become an established practice all over the world. The names of the dead appear on monuments commemorating lives lost in both World Wars and in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, and on Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. In all such lists there is an immediate recognition of the power of naming, this deceptively simple way in which we bestow identity and individuality upon others and ourselves. Reading a long list of the names of the dead becomes almost overwhelming as it goes on and on, so simply and brutally conveying the magnitude of all that was lost. Faced with such large losses of life, we find that the numbers of the dead tend to remain as abstractions in the mind but the names...the names are real. They take your breath away with their power. They can only be read with your heart in your mouth.
Finally, arranged in paragraphs, the names of the September 11 victims totaled more than eighty pages in manuscript.
While working on the names, I was also reading profiles and obituaries of the victims, personal accounts by survivors, as well as many factual and photographic books about the tragedy. I began to figure out what I wanted to put into all those blank spaces between the paragraphs of names.
I immersed myself in elegaic poetry in an attempt to discover the right tone, the delicate balance between lyricism and cold hard fact, between joy and despair. I read the work of many individual poets, and I studied an anthology called Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and published by W. W. Norton and Company. It contains more than two hundred poems by writers from Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Yeats to Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Tennyson to Sharon Olds, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Plath. I read Rilke’s Duino Elegies several times. From each of the poems I read, I learned something more about how to write about death, how to speak beautifully about the unspeakable. I carried Elie Wiesel’s memoir of the Holocaust, Night, in my purse for weeks.
Of utmost importance for inspiration, reassurance, structure, and style in this book was a collection of essays by Susan Griffin called A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, published by Doubleday in 1992. The last essay in the book, “Notes Toward a Sketch for a Work in Progress,” is about the paintings and writings of Charlotte Salomon, which were published in a book called Life? Or Theatre?: A Play with Music. The nearly eight hundred paintings in this book tell the story of Salomon’s short life. She was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1917. In 1943, pregnant, she was sent to her death at Auschwitz. Griffin uses a fragmentary collagelike structure to write about Salomon, including her thoughts on writing about Salomon, on her own life, and on the Gulf War, which begins while she is writing the essay. Many passages in this hundred-page essay described exactly what I was trying to do in Names of the Dead as well as the problems I was encountering.
Griffin writes: “There are so many stories I heard in the course of the writing that I would like to include in the book. But one cannot tell everything. The urgency of testimony, of bearing witness. A crowd pressing, like passengers, pushing to board a train already filled to capacity....Even in the retelling of one story, so many details have had to be left out. And others are given a new prominence. That is, I give them a prominence. And then the book itself, moving with its own life, makes certain choices which I must obey.”
I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write descriptions of the burning towers or details of the horrors that went on inside the buildings or the hijacked planes. Nor did I want to write about the politics of the event or my own reaction to the tragedy. In the face of it, my personal reaction was certainly no more important than anyone else’s. I wanted to write a book in which I did not appear. I knew that somehow all the victims had to be included in the book. To me, each person was of equal importance. They were all so different and yet there were so many similarities, too. How could I possibly give each of them a voice? I knew that I wanted to write primarily about the lives of the victims. We all knew about their deaths. I wanted to capture moments of their lives up to that moment.
Many of the fragments I have included are obviously factual in nature: for instance, the chronology of the day’s events, the technical information on the Boeing 767 and 757, the structural information on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the business information on Windows of the World and Cantor Fitzgerald, and the lists of collapsed and damaged buildings. Each detail included immediately after a victim’s name is also completely factual, including relationships between victims, birthdays, anniversaries, upcoming weddings and births, ages of surviving children, and so on.
The fragments that appear in series are also solely products of my research, drawing together and distilling the details of many individuals’ lives as described in their profiles and obituaries. These include the following series: “Tuesday morning,” “Distinguishing features” (including tattoos), “Last seen wearing” (both clothing and jewelry), “The future,” “The past,” “The things they carried,” “The things they loved,” “The things they hated,” “Former lives,” “Military honors,” “Occupations,” “Favorite books” (also favorite foods, movies, and television shows), “Police,” “Secrets,” and “What remains.”
In reading about the victims, I found that many things were mentioned over and over again: taking the children to the park, buying a new house, going grocery shopping, renovating, and so on. I decided I had to find a way to write about these common activities without mentioning any one person by name, thereby telling the story of an individual while at the same time using that small story to represent the stories of many others. Therefore, each narrative fragment appearing in a separate paragraph does tell a specific story, but it is not intended to refer directly to the name that immediately precedes it.
Beginning with the facts found in the profiles of the victims, I then elaborated from that to create short narrative scenes of events that had happened in the lives of the victims. Virtually all of the fragments of a narrative nature began with something I discovered in my research. For instance, in one profile it was noted that the individual was especially fond of the book A Short Guide to a Happy Life, by Anna Quindlen, and had given copies of it to all his friends. I felt free to imagine this in further detail and to include a passage from that book that he might have liked the most. The series called “On the desk” and “In the dream” were also written in this way. Many profiles mentioned what the individuals had kept on their desks. I then imagined these family pictures, trophies, cards, and other mementos in detail. The dreams included here were all also described in the profiles.
Only a very few fragments are wholly the product of my imagination. These include the short descriptions of ordinary objects and events, such as a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, candles and Legos on the coffee table, seeing a dead rat on the sidewalk, hearing the sounds of trains and rain and thunder in the night. Also imagined are the things the victims might have been planning to do on that Tuesday afternoon, such as clean out their desks, ask for a raise, or answer all their e-mails. The fragments describing what they did that Monday evening are factual, except for the ones that have them making love: these are my invention.
I did not know anyone who died on September 11. But for weeks at a time I felt closer to these three thousand dead people that I had never met than I did to anyone in my own life. As François Mauriac wrote in his foreword to Night: “It is not always the events we have been directly involved in that affect us the most.”
A
Gordon McCannel Aamoth Jr. Edelmiro (Ed) Abad. Maria Rose Abad. Tuesday, third day of the week, named for Tiu, the Germanic god of war and the sky.
Andrew Anthony Abate. Vincent P. Abate. Brothers. Best friends of Michael A. Uliano, also killed.
Laurence Christopher Abel. Alona Abraham. William F. Abrahamson. Richard Anthony Aceto. Heinrich Bernhard Ackermann. September. A month of returning and beginning: back to work, back to school, back to the regular routine; a new season, a new job, a new project; a month that for many marks the beginning of a new year more than New Year’s itself. A month of sharpened pencils, new shoes, the look of the leaves just before they start to turn. A month of optimism and renewed energy after the humid languor of summer. A change in the air, a change in the light, a change in the color of the sky. It was a beautiful morning. It was the eleventh day of the ninth month: 911.
Paul Andrew Acquaviva. Expectant father. His second child, a boy, was born on December 20, 2001.
Christian Adams. Donald...
